Monday, July 28, 2008

It seems like just the other day that I was updating you all on a regular basis, but life has come at us so fast this summer, with my wife working 6 days a week, we are just on the run all the time. Kids keep us running when we have any down time.

The hops have finally come alive, 5 weeks back I started to fertilize them , as I was not happy at all with the growth, and this has definitely worked , within 5 days we saw better growth and a lot of rain at the same time also helped no doubt. just used a general 17:17:17 , which had in my shed already for my garden use.

Rain has been hit and miss - literally - last weekend Greensboro City got 3 inches in one storm, and we got only trace, the second time this has happened in last few weeks. According to weather channel we are 5 inches behind this summer , and we are heading into another heat wave this coming weekI finally sent some time across the road working on the back row, we managed to put up a cable on top and Saturday with help from my neighbor , put up ropes for all but the Chinooks - as we still need one more pole and cable to that pole . That has made the hop yard look like something finally. I decided to try some basic twine for the Sterlings, as they are very slow growing and wont get heavy this summer yet.

We have also learnt a few things along the way - firstly , Rotted mulch is not a great soil additive as it ties up the nitrogen decomposing further,

despite the warnings about not using a high Nitrogen fertiliser - HOPS are gross feeders and need it...

also the warnings about horse manure - for same reasons above - are not true, the plants that had manure have done the best

using natural ropes are great, BUT they dont like soil contact, they rot very very quickly,

Lastly the Sterlings were not proven in this climate and have proven to be slow and difficult to grow - we lost 4 of the 7 plants taht made it to planting day, and I doubt we will get any yield off them at all this year, all the rest have done great,

For next year, we MUST get a waering system in, we need early planting on any new rhizomes, Cascades, Nugget, MtHood , Chinook, Centeniells will all get more plants next year

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The Battleground Brewers Guild Hop Project

This is a Co-Op of BBG members who wanted to either grow hops at home or had interest in fresh hops for their home brewing use. As my blog evolved we decided to run a separate Hops farm Blog http://bbghops.blogspot.com/The early information on the BBG Hops project is at the beginning of this blog (Pls look at Archive)

The BBG is a Home Brewing club in the Triad region of North Carolina , in zone 7b, formed to promote all aspects of Home Beer brewing. We meet monthly and more info can be found on our website www.battlegroundbrewers.com

The Idea of this project is to plant varieties that have been proven or are supposed to grow well in US Ag zone 7 . "Proven" also means anecdotal evidence from members or other beer lovers in the region. We eventually chose 8 varieties.

Each member is a partner in the enterprise, being expected to share equally financially, labor and well as yield in the end.

The land was leased for $1 to us for the project, and equipment use and well water also provided by the land owner.